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From poetry to pole vaulting, Olivia Tusinski ’04 (Leydon, Mass.) likes to approach most aspects of her life creatively. So when it came time to choose a topic for a yearlong honors research project, she took a creative approach.
“She’s doing a creative thesis about creativity,” says her thesis adviser, David Shulman, assistant professor of anthropology and sociology.
Tusinski, an anthropology and sociology major, began by reading the writings of a variety of social theorists on creativity, then looking for a way in which elite institutions of higher education reward their students’ creative pursuits.
“I’m analyzing all the awards that are offered to undergraduates at seven institutions,” says Tusinski, who spent her junior year studying abroad at St. Catherine’s College at the University of Oxford. “I’m trying to see how many of them can be fit into the category of rewarding creativity.”
Tusinski gathered data on awards given in the humanities and social sciences at Lafayette and six Ivy League schools: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania. She has discovered that awards are rarely given for creative pursuits, and almost never for creative activities involving more than one student.
“There’s a really small percentage of awards for creativity,” she says. “And I’ve actually found only three so far out of hundreds that award any sort of collaborative activities involving creativity.”
Shulman describes Tusinski as “very, very good student” with a wide variety of interests, both academic and extra-curricular. For example, she has been accepted to serve with the Peace Corps in Africa following graduation.
“She’s doing challenging reading on very complicated social theories,” he says. “What she’s doing involves trying to dig out her own insights and seeing how the social theorists’ ideas resonate with elite institutions of higher learning. There really is a lot of originality and a lot of work involved in this project.”
Shulman is coauthor of Talking Sociology, a textbook in its fifth edition, and is completing revisions on a second book-length manuscript, Clothing Naked Emperors: The Role of Deception in Workplace Culture. He has published his research in numerous academic journals and has articles forthcoming in The American Sociologist and Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Last year, he accompanied several students who presented research at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society in Philadelphia.
Tusinski says Shulman has offered her a great deal of help and encouragement in her research and has helped her see the work from a sociological standpoint.
“He’s very analytical, critical, and full of suggestions and interesting angles,” she says. “He’s also very qualified and extremely supportive and enthusiastic.”
Tusinski adds that William Bissell, assistant professor of anthropology and sociology, has helped her analyze her work from an anthropological standpoint.
“Lafayette is a solid environment for working on a thesis,” she says. “It has a wide variety of gifted professors and great resources.”
A graduate of Pioneer Valley Regional High School, Northfield, Tusinski is a member of the Emile Durkheim Society for sociologists and writes poetry. She is a former member of the women’s track and field team and was indoor Patriot League champion in the pole vault. Last month, she organized a campus event for Americans for Democracy featuring music producer Nile Rodgers as a guest speaker.
Honors thesis projects are among several major opportunities at Lafayette that make the College a national leader in undergraduate research. Lafayette sends one of the largest contingents to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research each year. Forty-two students have been accepted to present their work at the annual conference this month.